On another Gulch Post, some discussion and even disagreements arose about the value of the individual vote, particularly on the national scene and the alleged importance for Objectivist on the site to help conservatives get elected since they are the least worst of the two major parties offered and that we shouldn't 'waste our vote' by voting for some third party candidate. Simply not voting was also criticized even more strongly.

For myself, I've long been convinced that elections are largely entertainment and of absolutely no consequence in the government and policies of this country, and in fact haven't been since Lincoln's time with the beginnings of the democratization of the vote and in particular, since Roosevelt's dictatorship. My argument centers on the facts that elected and appointed officials don't actually run the institutions and agencies of government. They are just the face presented to the public much as the talking heads of news broadcasts. The real government consists of the bureaucracies and the Executive Services branches of those operations, that have taken over nearly every aspect of our national policies and even local government.

I've discovered a fairly new published book by an author with much experience in the inner or dark government that actually runs this country. While the author writes and relates from his area of experience in National Security within the government, it is my contention that the facts of this book apply throughout government and reveals how much secret and hidden power and insularity these bureaucrats actually have and exercise, and how little those that we elect and those that get appointed can affect anything, including the courts. Although I haven't finished the book by any means, I'm still ready to recommend the book and discussion of the issues revealed within the book.

"By Jordan Michael Smith OCTOBER 19, 2014
THE VOTERS WHO put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.

But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.

Why did the face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same? Critics tend to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted with politics to take a harder line. But Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon has a more pessimistic answer: Obama couldn’t have changed policies much even if he tried.

Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy."

Can this 'double government' ever be reigned in to actually be influenced by the public and concerns of citizens?